Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Run BitNami Apps on Windows Azure

Every month, hundreds of thousands of BitNami users visit our website to launch their favorite web applications, from project management tools to development environments and business apps. Part of what makes BitNami so attractive to so many users is our focus on providing a consistent experience on different platforms. You can download a WordPress installer or virtual machine and develop locally in your laptop, regardless of whether it is running Windows, Mac or OS X. Once you are ready to go into production, you can easily launch a machine in the cloud with the exact same configuration and easily transfer your content.

Today, we are happy to announce our support for Windows Azure. Starting today, and over the next few weeks, we will be making all BitNami applications available on their Open Source community portal, called the VM Depot. We have been working closely with Microsoft Open Technologies to make this happen and we have to say we are impressed with the focus and determination to make open source apps run optimally on top of their platform. For those of us that lived through Microsoft domination of the 1990s and early 2000s, this was a bit puzzling at first. But looking at the fiercely competitive landscape of Cloud Computing, it makes perfect sense in order to further the adoption of the platform. With the release of the community portal, Microsoft just took another significant step on their way to challenge the current dominant Cloud player.

We are happy to add Windows Azure as an additional Cloud platform, providing our users with the choice of one more high-quality platform to deploy our apps. Moving forward we plan to continue to invest significant resources to make BitNami applications run smoothly on Windows Azure.